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Monday, 23 January 2012

The Struggle for Religious Freedom 2. – the Unitarian Martyrs of 1612

In 1912 the
British and Foreign Unitarian Association published a four page pamphlet
entitled “Tercentenary of the Unitarian Martyrs” which I recently found stuck
in another book from around the same period. Who where these Unitarian martyrs?
Where people really burned at the stake for Unitarian views? Surely we should mark there 400th anniversary of these deaths.

Last year
we celebrated the birth of Servetus, the Unitarian thinker tried and burned in
Calvinist Geneva. Servetus is an important figure as the reaction to his death
led to the first serious challenge to the belief that the State should combat religious
“heresy” by judicial murder.

Sadly, this
ideal took some time to spread. In 1612 we find the last burnings for heresy in
England, of Bartholomew
Legate at Smithfield, London
on 18 March and Edward Wightman at Lichfield
on 11 April. Both suffered for denying the Trinitarian doctrine in an appalling
repetition of the days of religious conflict in the previous century with the
Protestant-Roman Catholic wars.

Bartholomew
Legate, according to Fuller’s Church History of Britain, appears to have been a
man of fine personal appearance, of high character, scholarly attainments and a
very conversant with the Bible. He was a native of Essex,
aged about forty. Fuller states in a vile phrase:

“His
conversation, for aught I can learn to the contrary, very unblameable; and the
poison of heretical doctrine is never more dangerous than when served up in
clean cups and washed dishes”

Legate
openly expressed his Unitarian views opposing the Athanasian and Nicene creeds.
He was cast into Newgate Prison but later released. He resumed preaching and
was summoned to appear before the Ecclesiastical
Court presided over by the Bishop of London.
Convicted of heresy he was handed over to the secular judges.

King James
(I of England
and VI of Scotland) apparently had many interviews with him to persuade him to
recant but failed. On one occasion he ended up kicking Legate when he learned
that he did not pray to Jesus Christ. On 18 March 1612 he was fastened to the
stake at Smithfield
and burned to death surrounded by a huge number of spectators. He was the last
that died at Smithfield
for religious truth. These events are described in a fictional account of Legate’s
life by the author Florence Cregg in 1886 which is in the General Assembly’s
online document library.

Edward
Wightman died less than a month later in Lichfield in the Midlands.
He appears to have been “a visionary person whose eccentric opinions would be
best met by patience and friendly counsel”. He unfortunately petitioned King
James who remitted his case to Bishop Neile of Lichfield.
He was tried and condemned and taken to the stake twice; he recanted on the
first occasion, then refused to do so in Court and was burned on 11 April 1612.
on Easter Saturday.

Fuller
interestingly concludes that public execution had the effect of increasing
public sympathy for those burned amongst the common people and that King James
decided that “heretics thereafter, though condemned, should silently and
privately waste away in the prison”. Many years later in September 1662 we find
John Biddle, the founder of Unitarian worship in London, dying in prison after suffering six
terms of imprisonment. (see the
forthcoming “The Struggle For Religious Freedom 3. blog entry)

Ironically
then, these deaths had the effect of rendering public execution for religious
belief unpalatable in England.
The were the last burnings for heresy in England.

This
article is based on “Tercentenary of the Unitarian Martyrs” (B&FUA 1912)
and Robert Spears (ed) “Record of Unitarian Worthies” (1870)